Mu2e's opportunistic run on the Open Science Grid

From Fermilab Today, July 15, 2015

To conduct full event simulations, Mu2e requires time on more than one computing grid. This graphic shows, by the size of each area, the fraction of the recent Mu2e simulation production through Fermigrid, the University of Nebraska, CMS computing at Caltech, MIT and Fermilab, the ATLAS Midwest and Michigan Tier-2s (MWT2 and AGLT2), Syracuse University (SU-OSG) and other sites — all accessed through the Open Science Grid.

Hanah Chang

Scientists in Fermilab's Mu2e collaboration are facing a challenging task: In order to get DOE approval to build their experiment and take data, they must scale up the simulations used to design their detector.

Their aim is to complete this simulation campaign, as they call it, in time for the next DOE critical-decision review, which Mu2e hopes
will give the green light to proceed with experiment construction and data taking. The team estimated that they would need the computing
capacity of about 4,000 CPUs for four to five months (followed by a much smaller need for the rest of the year). Because of the large size
of the campaign and the limited computing resources at Fermilab, which are shared among all the lab's experiments, the Mu2e team adapted
their workflow and data management systems to run a majority of the simulations at sites other than Fermilab. They then ran simulations across
the Open Science Grid using distributed high-throughput computer facilities.